


The Past Recaptured

by thewrathofbombast



Category: Psycho-Pass
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:28:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23383798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewrathofbombast/pseuds/thewrathofbombast
Summary: This story is set following Kogami's return to Japan and before Tsunemori Akane is sent to jail.
Relationships: Kougami Shinya/Tsunemori Akane
Comments: 10
Kudos: 87





	The Past Recaptured

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set following Kogami's return to Japan and before Tsunemori Akane is sent to jail.

_There must have been no break of continuity, not a moment of rest for me, no cessation of existence, of thought, of consciousness of myself, since this distant moment still clung to me and I could recapture it, go back to it, merely by descending more deeply within myself._ Marcel Proust - _The Past Recaptured_. 

Akane studied the profile of the woman at the wheel, conjuring up Saiga’s edicts on the subject of kinesics, a scrutiny the other woman seemed more than prepared to deflect if her trained face was anything to go by. She had been asked to be trusted for one day and one day only. No trace of a grimace or a smile on her lips, behind her sunglasses Hanashiro Frederica seemed impenetrable, and still, there was a tension between them that Akane couldn’t contest.

She turned her gaze towards the robust foliage on her side, catching in the green rush a fleeting glance of her own face on the window. In her expression a disquiet not internally registered. Was she nervous? Was this instinct? It had been there before, hadn’t it? When a dominator led her to Sibyl’s secret. The question she had ruminated on so many times came to mind, _would it have been better not to know?_ To not carry the burden of knowing, the unyielding weight of that truth, and the torrent of guilt that came with it? She was the protector of a secret unworthy of keeping, and it had festered inside her, corrupted her. 

“We are close by.” Hanashiro’s voice was always courteous, if a little aloof. She was imposingly beautiful—a presence that would hardly go unnoticed anywhere. Akane nodded. They had been on the road for a good three hours now.

There was another truth in the answer to that question: she would always prefer to know, _always,_ if only because it meant she could try to protect the people she still had. It wouldn’t do to fight blinded with an unknown enemy, to be trifled with by the system like a plaything, and if truth would make her a traitor to everything and everyone, she would have to carry that too one day.

The car took a turn down a narrow, unpaved road. Tips of branches pattered at her window. The road led to a large, one-story house hemmed-in by trees. Hanashiro parked the car in front, but did not turn off the engine.

Akane looked at her in a mingle of uncertainty and suspicion. “You’re not going in?”

“I don’t need to be there.”

Akane stared back at the house. So this was the way the system had decided to take her out. Dappled sunlight poured through the large windows inside, no one visible from her vantage. “What is this? Why did you bring me here?”

“You’re a mere steps away from finding your answer. Believe me, if it were up to me I would’ve saved us all the trouble of this nonsense.” Hanashiro brought a gloved hand to her face and pushed her sunglasses up the bridge of her nose. “I suppose even someone like me can respect some measure of sentimentality.”

“Sentimentality?” Akane did not know why her heart was beating so fast. Hanashiro did not answer, and both knew it was because she had already said too much. She was waiting for her to get off the car, Akane realized. “I don’t even have my dominator with me.”

Hanashiro turned to look at her, and it wasn’t clear if she was glaring through her sunglasses. “Good. If you had it, you might be tempted to use it.”

Akane opened the door of the car and descended. Warm spring breeze touched her face and the smooth rumor of leaves soared high above her. The forest seemed to have been encroaching on the house, gradually reclaiming its rightful territory. Akane closed the car door and heard the tires on the gravel drive back up, turn around and drive farther and farther away from her. She glanced over her shoulder to watch the car leave. She could not tell if Hanashiro looked back at her in the mirror.

_Is this some type of joke? How am I even supposed to get back?_

Before realizing it, she was climbing the steps leading to the door. She reached out to touch the handle, tree shadows dancing on the pale skin of her wrist. With a sharp breath of resolve, she turned it and gave the door a push.

“Hello?” She shaded her eyes. The heat of the day was warm on the black of her blazer.

Silence. At her second, louder call, quick movement followed somewhere in the interior of the house—the hurried padding of bare feet on a wooden floor. Her own backpedaling feet halted dead on their tracks by the figure emerging at the back of the vestibule. A figure she’d recognize anywhere. If this was another of Sibyl’s games, it could surely be ranked amongst its cruelest.

She watched him, wary and incredulous, as he stepped onto the distorted rectangle the open door had cut on the floor. The vertical glow of that stripe of light crawling up along his body, until his bright, glaucous gaze was squinting back at her, discerning her. Softening upon recognizing her.

“Kogami-san,” she muttered in an expiration, and the mere act of saying it made it palpably and terribly real. “What—” She swallowed hard. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s been a while, Inspector. I didn’t know if you would come.”

His mouth softened into a smirk, and Akane realized she was still standing on the threshold, shock and ambivalence manifested plainly in her body. Stepping into the genkan, she proceeded to remove her shoes in tense silence before following him through a maze of vacant rooms and wooden hallways. Bare cream walls, no furniture—nothing offered a clue as to what this place was or what she, _he,_ was doing here.

They reached the back of the house and entered a large sitting room with a small kitchen area, its ceiling-to-floor windows framing the twisted limbs of beautiful, lush maple trees and the moss-blanketed rocks of what had once been a traditional Japanese garden. In a corner, a small stack of paper books crowned with an ashtray stood next to a rolled-up futon.

Akane ensconced herself on a tall stool around a counter island in the kitchen. Standing across from her uniformed self, casually attired in jeans and a black shirt, Kogami resembled a civilian about to be interviewed for an investigation. It felt like a million years had passed since SEAUn.

“I didn’t want to shock you,” he said.

“Shock me?”

“We’re likely to run into each other now, and I didn’t want you to—”

“So you’re working for Foreign Affairs now,” Akane established, realizing with a jolt that it sounded like a judgement. “I mean…that’s great. It’s really great.”

“She’s persuasive.”

Akane shifted in her seat uncomfortably. “I know. She tried to recruit an enforcer from my division, although unsuccessfully...that time.”

“She did mention that,” he replied with a voice low, warm and confiding, and Akane felt a reflex rejection of that enforced trifold complicity. “She praised your division, said it had something special.”

Akane looked at him straight in the eye. His ever imperturbable gaze wandered over her face, attempting to read her thoughts too. It hit her that, when it came to him, she’d never be as good as Saiga-san…or Hanashiro-san. She was the one to lower her eyes first. “How did she even find you?”

“I suppose the same way you found me last time.”

“Except she was able to bring you back,” Akane murmured tonelessly. The white tiles of the kitchen floor looked impeccably clean.

He fell silent, and she repented of those words. It cheapened everything. Akane looked up, and made herself smile widely, sincerely. “I’m glad to see you’re fine.”

His hands were busy lighting a Spinel cigarette. The old, relished fragrance came to her in volutes from his lips, raising upwards. His weather-beaten hands, molded to the trigger of guns or hardened into punching fists, betrayed in smoking an elegance he’d never been able to rid himself of.

“Many times I thought that was for the best. A real goodbye. A clean cut.”

“You’re home now, Kogami-san,” Akane reminded him warmly. “No more regrets. You have a second chance here.” She was working a way around the sharpness of his eyes, veiled behind the smoke as she sat there, unarmed. “Ginoza-san will be happy to know you’re here.”

It worked. His back was leaning against the counter in front of her. His hand suspended in midmovement, and this time it was him who averted his eyes. “Who knows.”

“ _I_ know.” Akane smiled confidently. “If only you two weren’t so stubborn. I’m sure when you talk—”

“And you? Are you happy to know I’m here?” Kogami caught her eyes again; probing, interrogating.

Akane hesitated. The last she’d seen of him had been amidst crossfire in a place remote, both reeling in the aftermath of a brush with certain death. They had never said goodbye, it was true. But he was alive—she’d made sure of that when she sent Ginoza-san to hunt him. He was alive, she remembered thinking then, and she could finally let him go.

“Of course I am,” Akane said softly, keeping the quaver from her voice.

“You can barely look at me.”

“I’m surprised, that’s all.”

“You also thought that was goodbye.” Kogami ambled over and took the seat on the counter next to her, their arms so close to brushing Akane felt her body tense up. “Didn’t you?”

“Not…like that, no. I was always certain you’d find a way to survive.” _I was sure that when I met you again, you would’ve found the peace you were looking for._

The cigarette consumed idly in his hand as he watched her. Akane didn’t know if she was disputing his previous accusation or reaffirming herself instead, but she held his gaze steadily. The white thin line of a scar crossed his temple. A more recent one divulged a death-dealing intent, marring the side of his neck. He huffed softly. “You did always think like that.”

“Would it had been better if I thought another way?” Her voice came laced with a bitterness she didn’t recognize. “Would that have made things easier? Sometimes I wonder about that.”

“Back in SEAUn,” Kogami took a last drag before crumpling the smoldering stub in his fist. “You said I wasn’t like Makishima. Even when I was tempted and had reason to, even when others welcomed it or demanded it. It sure would’ve made living a hell of a lot easier.” He frowned, his eyes set in some point in the past, she figured. “And yet, those words may have been the only thing keeping me from going completely insane all this time, even if I’d lost my way.”

Her hands twitched at the faith permeating his voice, and her own invisible scars burned like a thousand fresh cuts. Pushing forward, changing the future, that should’ve been enough for her. Why, then, did she keep turning her head to look at the past, over and over again? 

He sighed nonchalantly. “I guess I don’t have any right to say this, since your belief was so convenient to me in the first place, but I never thought the easy way out suited your style. After all,” the corners of his lips quirked up, “you’re a tough and not-very-nice woman.”

Akane huffed with amusement. “I’ll make sure to work on being nicer, then.”

“Don’t.” His voice was stern, peremptory. “I told you. Yours is the right way of thinking. I’d even go as far as saying that it might be your sole fault I’m here at all.”

“I don’t know about that, Kogami-san. But, if I’m ever found guilty, then that’ll be the one fault I can be proud of.” She put two fingers to her brow, and saluted ceremoniously.

The diaphanous, gorgeous sound of laughter took her unawares. It was brief and overtaking, like lighting, going as it came. The remaining shock being that, hard as she tried, she could not recall ever seeing him laugh before. She tore her gaze away in time, tasting a mounting, disconcerting something that resembled shame, and weakness, and panic. By then her cheeks were incriminatingly flushed.

“I doubt you’d have too many faults,” he said heartily. “This one certainly might be your worst one yet.”

With nervous, wandering eyes, she found herself wanting for an object to remark on. “What’s this place, anyway?” It annoyed her how forced she sounded. “It’s so far away from the city.”

“Just a temporary residence while all my paperwork comes through. Hanashiro-san thought it necessary. For my protection.”

“Protection.” She held her breath, grasping at the culmination of that thought. Her eyes whipped back to him. “From the MWPSB.”

“Don’t look like that, Inspector,” he chided coolly. “Ministries and bureaucrats have their own arcane ways of bending the rules they so inexorably impose on everyone else. It’s how they hold their power. I’ll be okay.”

“And you trust Hanashiro-san that much?” demanded Akane, her voice thick with urgency. _I should’ve—I should’ve studied her better. Does she also know of Sibyl’s secret? Is that why she’s negotiating the life of a man whose execution order is still active? The one who murdered Makishima? Or…is she a pursuer, doing Sibyl’s dirty work, luring outliers to where the system can promptly eliminate them before they gain any influence against Sibyl?_

“ _Oi,_ Inspector.” At the firm grasp on her shoulder, the rush of tumultuous thoughts dissipated at once, and when he fixed her with those serious, slate eyes, the wild thrumming of her heart did not subside, but it’s crazy rhythm was definitely for something else. How was she still under his sway like this? “I’m _here_. I’ll be fine. If the system wanted to kill me it would’ve done so already.”

Akane bit the inside of her lip wanting for it to be true. Truth, it turned out, rarely agreed with her desires. But she wasn’t one keen on illusions. Not anymore. Sibyl knew Kogami Shinya was in Japan, and it had let him live for a reason. A leverage too advantageous to forgo. A leverage she wasn’t privy to. Not yet. That was the evident deduction, and it revolted her to the core to know Sibyl this well, to admit that the pivotal relationship of her life was the one she had to _that._

Logically, reasonably, the enigma around that sudden leniency should’ve been the main priority occupying her mind. Instead, an overriding, merciless impulse had been beating inside her from the moment he touched her. She would’ve called it madness any other day, when her trembling hands rose to touch the one grasping her shoulder. Kogami winced, just perceptively, but didn’t retreat. He waited as her fingers trailed over the sinuous angles of his knuckles, the warm skin, the long bones. She closed her eyes, and let herself feel.

“Afraid I might be a holo…or a ghost?”

His voice betrayed nothing, as usual, but Akane didn’t have to guess. _Would a ghost’s pulse race like this?_ It seeped into her mind, the private ritual where lighting cigarettes in the solitude of her room became an invocation. _Would a ghost tense like this? Would his hand be clammy like this?_

Her eyes opened slowly, as if from a dream, finding focus on his gentle, perplexed expression. Akane released his hand as if it were a scalding ember. “It’s not funny.”

He wasn’t smiling. His outstretched hand lingered there for a second before he slowly withdrew his arm. “You worry too much, Inspector.”

“What if the system rejects her request?” she asked sharply. Something about touching him emboldened her to claim the right to reproach. “Did that thought ever cross your mind?”

He gave a low, frustrated sigh, like he’d been expecting the reprove all along. “Then so be it.”

“Why wasn’t this arranged beforehand? At least outside of Japan…” _He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what Sibyl is capable of, even if he’d suspected it._

“I suppose this is the type of procedure where you need the subject in the flesh.”

“In the flesh?” Akane could hear her own voice raising. “Don’t you know there’s an execution order for you?”

“I’m aware of it.”

“Then… _why_?” she grunted. “Why would you come back here?”

No offhand reply from him this time, but a shadow passing over his stunned face—something like dejection, like feeling repudiated—before he turned away from her. His eyes seemed now to be boring holes into the groves beyond the window glass. Her lips parted wordlessly, floundering to articulate something sensible out of the flurry of emotions he’d set off.

“Kogami-san.” Akane softened her quivering voice, and he recoiled at the sound. “Please, don’t misund—”

“Correct me if I’m wrong.” He refused to look at her. “But wasn’t it _you_ who wanted to arrest me when we last saw each other? How exactly would you have stopped my execution then if that’s your concern now?”

A stirring chill ran through Akane at her carelessness.

“Unless…” He turned again to watch her coldly, to read her eyes for truth. “Unless you knew a workaround, a way to get the system to make an exception. Not the proverbial honorary concession. Not immunity for someone with noble contributions to society. _No_. You wanted absolution for a murderer and a terrorist.”

Akane felt something in her chest clamp down, like she was running out of breath. “At the time I was conducting an investig—”

“Fine. Then let’s take you at your word, or at Sibyl’s. You knew I’d be executed, yet you wanted to arrest me. Was that your plan all along, Tsunemori? It’s not like you.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she snapped defensively, sensing he was circumvolving around a much more personal and damaging secret.

“It mattered a year ago. Has so much changed in a year?”

Akane glared straight into his eyes, the blue-gray forest swaying in them. “It has.”

“It hasn’t. I’ll show you.”

He made a quick lunge at her and Akane lifted her fists to deflect or hit by ingrained, muscle-memory reaction. An underhanded, dirty attack to wrap his arms tightly around her, trapping her against him. She heard her own shuddering breath fall on his shoulder, threatening to become a whimper, for his body—hot-blooded, physical, fully present—was a rousing bolt, thawing something deeply buried in her. All thought escaped her as he squeezed her tighter. “See?” he whispered close to her ear, luring Akane to clench her eyes shut. “It’s only me. I’m not a stranger, Tsunemori.”

The words were pronounced in anger, but if he was making a point of punishing her, it was taking too long to be credible anymore. So she sank in it freely, let herself be drowned in it. Like swirls of smoke, hurt and doubt left her, replaced by sensation—like in the refracted light all the invisible threads that united her to him glinted furiously, cobwebs she thought pulverized, glowing anew like silver strands piercing through them both. Slowly, wanting, her arms looped under his, about his back and over his shoulders. She held him like that for who knows how long, suspecting he needed it too.

Once submerged and taken, the wave of impulse grew ruthless and commanding—not that it would show on the surface. Not at least until her lips brushed the scar on his neck with such deliberate intent, that Akane felt him stiffen under her arms, and the shock of her kiss travel the length of his body. Dreamed she could taste on his skin the dust of the roads he’d traveled, miles away to come to her, taste life on his skin, because, yes, he _was_ alive and—as absurd as the assertion was—so was she, and that was all that mattered. So when his tremulous lips found hers, it felt like she was the one arriving home, something so primal and vital being forged in the interior of his kiss, that it astounded her how long she’d gone without it.

It was a language. One that became more fluid and effortless the further they went, an ebb and flow as his tongue taunted hers, and their mouths grappled breathlessly and desperately for a contact from so long deprived. His hands were slow up and down her flanks, slipping under her blazer while hers ran along the tautness of his arms, sank in his soft hair, down to his jaw and throat. Akane’s fingers met a button by the collar of his shirt and unfastened it hastily, then another one, before Kogami seized her wrists and broke away. Her eyes snapped open.

“Akane.” Redness about his lips. The mere utterance of her name an objection. Those sharp eyes…torn between terror and desire. “You have to tell me that this is okay. That…”

He was breathing fast, his shoulders heaving, and she was already twisting from his grasp in protest. Kogami let her go with hardly any resistance, and Akane flung her arms around his neck, pressing against him with more strength than needed; his arms already compliant, already surrounding her again, her whole body snug in the space between his legs. “Yes, yes,” she murmured. “This is good.”

He planted a kiss on her neck, and half picked her up as he stood. Lips falling again on hers, pliant on hers, letting her taste him again as he steered her towards the other end of the room. Clothes flew around them, and a small tower of books crowned with an ashtray was unwittingly knocked down.

Akane pressed her nose on his bare chest, drawing in the scent of soap and tobacco, before her mouth—her _mouth_ , still a neophyte and stranger to this language—parted on his skin to kiss and lick with the conviction of a devotee, guided by his gasps of pleasure and relief. She never knew what giving this pleasure to another was, and she was finding out—as his mouth bit on her shoulder, as his hands grew painfully frustrated with her skirt and tights—that not the most vivid fantasy could ever pay justice to the heady sensation of _him._

They hit the futon as if shipwrecked by breakers: gasping, naked, and amazed. She threw her head back on the soft cotton with a quivering gasp at the trail of ravages his mouth was leaving on her neck, her breasts, her waist. _Come,_ she imagined she begged. As if he’d read her mind, he crawled over her, and his desire—vehement, all-embracing of her body, of _her_ —suspended above Akane, patent in his darkened pupils. She took his jaw and pulled him down for a kiss, her nude body awash with heat and ruddiness under the weight and strength of his. They were drowning. His hips trapped between her thighs, her still marveled hands groping for him, speaking, coaxing him out of any last doubt.

Kogami sank in her slowly, and for a strange, novel minute Akane felt pain. His panting was hot on the crook of her neck when she whimpered, and a second later he was biting her chin, tempering that other pain, befogging it. Eager, sweet sounds arose from her throat, spurring him to roll his hips over and over until Akane found herself undulating against him like a thousand waves, matching him in cadence, swimming with him. Rapt and out of her mind, Akane thought she never wanted to forget what his sex felt like in her, what pleasured grunts and moans sounded like in Kogami Shinya’s velvet voice. He rose slightly to slip a hand down her body, coupling the deepest of all caresses with the touch of his fingers, and Akane moaned freely at his mercy and command. That place to which he was taking her with a mischievous glint in his eyes, she could feel herself arriving there, digging her nails on his lower back and crying out as a blinding rush of pleasure swept over her. Still quivering when his mouth met hers, she wrapped her arms around his neck, wrapped her legs tightly around his waist, pulling him down like gravity towards her. Rough, reckless collisions as they went and, upon hearing his voice break on her name while he caught up to her, Akane tightened up a second time where she enveloped him. Kogami jerked and succumbed with a groan, his whole body palpitant and gleaming with sweat, and he never looked more human and more divine.

Lazily, he nestled his head on the curve of her neck. Akane stroked his hair gently while contemplating the easy sway of leaves against the blue sky outside. The glimmer of the sinking sun radiated intermittently through them. It was a beautiful sight. His hand began tracing the contours of her hip bone, demanding her attention again. She looked down the length of their bodies, speckled with shadows of leaves, their legs half-entangled like tree roots.

“Have you spoken to your mother?” she asked softly, stocktaking the mess they had made across the room, an improbable clutter of books and clothes scattered on the floor.

He burrowed his face further down her neck and shoulder. “Last night.”

“How did that go?”

He didn’t answer right away, and Akane placed her much smaller hand over his, flattening it on her navel. “We cried…a lot.”

“She must’ve been so happy. She missed you so much. _We_ all missed you so much.”

He stayed very still and silent for a moment as if struck with sudden bafflement, and then: “Just wait until I tell her about this.”

“What?” Akane squealed with infinite embarrassment. “Don’t you dare!”

He was laughing again and kissing her shoulder between laughs. “Okay, I won’t, I won’t.”

Akane mock-smacked his hand before laying hers softly over it again. She realized she was terrified. For him. For them. She pushed those thoughts aside as he held her closer and she spoke the truest words she could muster at the moment.

“Welcome home, Kogami Shinya.”

“Glad to be home.”


End file.
